President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump are greeted by guests as they arrive to the New Year’s Eve celebration Tuesday evening, Dec. 31, 2019, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla.
Former prosecutors piled on President Donald Trump’s efforts to obliterate anti-corruption efforts and destroy policies dedicated to preventing bribery and money laundering in the country.
The Atlantic reports this week “brought the biggest blow yet: The Treasury has obliterated a recent rule to deter devious shell companies, handily reopening the American economy to anyone looking to hide their illicit wealth.”
On Tuesday, the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced that businesses formed in the United States would no longer need to disclose their actual owners. Worse, it determined that nearly all the data already gathered on such companies would be destroyed.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the move “a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” but former prosecutors told MS NOW that it effectively destroys years of hard work curbing shifty financial networks and provides cover for wealthy American tax dodgers and money launderers.
“If you look at this sort of small scale fraud, they are now solely pursuing, whether it's against daycares in Minneapolis or food trucks in southern California, I'm willing to bet that if you did another sort of demographic breakdown and analysis, you would find that this is just one more piece of the administration's general preference to go after minorities at the expense of going after people who are actually damaging the country,” former prosecutor Michael Feinberg told MS NOW anchor Nicole Wallace. “The notion that you would go after a daycare or a food truck or something else with a relatively small economic footprint and no tentacles that reach into other criminal organizations while giving a pass to major corporations that might actually be committing large scale fraud, or enabling embezzlement. And money laundering is insane. And I can't find any legitimate motive for it.”
Feinberg added that prosecution of huge, multi-faceted schemes like those cooked up by Enron will be a thing of the past under Trump’s gutted departments.
“That's going to be exponentially more difficult the next time something like that happens, because this department of justice [have] jettisoned literally centuries of cumulative subject matter expertise and experience. You can't just replace a toughened, experienced prosecutor or a seasoned investigator with somebody who just graduated from law school or Quantico.”
Former prosector and DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer also pointed out that Trump has walked away from major cases against wealthy individuals by either surrendering investigations or pardoning them entirely. Worse, he’s erasing the money many convicted felons were sentenced to pay back to their financial victims.
“I was a federal public defender for about ten years, and the majority of my clients were low-income people of color, and those people have always experienced the unfairness of the criminal justice system because of disproportionate targeting with prosecutions because of having less resources to defend those cases,” Oyer told Wallace. “This administration has essentially doubled down on those disparities. …Trump does not care one bit about who he is targeting disproportionately and how his prosecution policies affect communities of color, low-income communities, communities with large immigrant populations.”
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